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Billed as the first digital home assistant, Audrey was released in November 2000. Jointly designed by the famed design firm, IDEO, and the tech industry’s then flavour of the month, 3COM, Audrey was praised for its industrial design and innovative appliance-like approach to home computing. Six months later, Audrey was on her way to the proverbial glue factory.

Named, somewhat incongruously, after Audrey Hepburn, the domestic appliance was conceived in response to the heavyweight computing paradigm prevalent in the day. The premise was a computer designed for the home; a simplified device with limited input mechanisms, a basic feature set and a softened aesthetic (available in five ‘kitchen matching’ colours: meadow, linen, ocean, slate and sunshine).
Interleaving interview transcripts recorded with two of Audrey’s design team with written materials available on the appliance, we consider why a technology failed that on the face of it was thoughtfully designed and strategically targeted. Self-reflection from the designers will be set against the hyperbole surrounding the product’s release and its cult status achieved in subsequently spawned online forums. Overall, the collected materials will be amassed to critically reflect on the sudden demise of Audrey. Given the lessons learnt from Audrey’s history, thought will also be given to whether it may be time to revisit the idea of an information appliance for the home and what form this appliance might take.

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Ingunn Moser & John Law (1999: 174)

What is it to be capable? How might we elbow away the conditions that limit ability, to become more capable?
In this short piece, I take seriously Rebekah’s invitation to account for “different ways of doing, acting, and living in the world”. The anthropological imperative to “take into account difference” and consider how objects “intersect with social worlds, imaginaries and emergent social practices” speaks to my ongoing efforts to engage, productively, with the long and troubled relationship between technology and dis/ability. Specifically, it resonates with work I’ve been undertaking that asks what, if anything, artificial intelligence (AI) might offer the blind and vision impaired.
What I want to do in the following is give some space to an idea of capability that I’ve found especially generative in rethinking this pairing of ability and technology, and in asking what AI could be good for. I find works like that of Shreeharsh Kelkar’s (published on the CASTAC blog) to be valuable here in critically examining what AI introduces to the technsocial assemblages of work, entertainment and leisure, and the boundaries enacted in/through such figurings. Like Shreeharsh, I hesitate to define, again, what counts as AI. Turning things around, my concern is for a capability that is achieved with others, and what the possibility of becoming capable together might mean for designing AI-with-dis/ability differently.
Thinking with dis/ability, I’ve found myself returning to a mixture of writings in disability studies, science and technology studies (STS), and feminist technoscience. I’ve drawn particular inspiration from Charles Goodwin and Ingunn Moser who have, in different ways, provided examples of the careful study of practice; both show a commitment to disrupting those sedimented “distributions of power and agency” which seem to come too easily when working with dis/ability (Moser 2005: 667). Also, offering a somewhat tangential perspective have been Donna Haraway’s writings and Vinciane Despret’s manifold accounts of animals. I’m conscious Haraway and Despret may seem peculiar reference points with their shared concerns for speculative/science fictions and stories with companion species, and I’m sensitive to what may appear to be the problematic connections I am drawing between such ‘fabulations’ and human dis/ability. However, my intention here is not to insist on direct parallels but to use the productive and uplifting works of Haraway and Despret to introduce a different point of view and, I hope, new questions around capability.
With this backdrop, the first thing to say is that the commonly referred to deficit model in disability studies presents an especially worrying version of capability. This version places the individual along a spectrum of ability, where what he or she can or cannot do defines them as more or less capable. Thus, blindness and vision impairment are indicative of an absence of ability. Worse still, if being human is defined somehow by a set of pre-defined abilities that constitute a ‘prototypical body’, then an absence of some sort or another conjures up the image of an actor who is less-than-human.
It’s this version of capability that Charles Goodwin troubles so convincingly in his careful analysis of the conversations between an aphasic man, Chil, and his family. Chil has only three words in his vocabulary, ‘yes’, ‘no’, and ‘and’. In a ‘formal linguistics’, Goodwin argues, Chil, with such a limited repertoire of words, “might seem an atypical, marginal figure for the study of human language, a defective actor who can be easily ignored without theoretical loss” (2004: 152). The “psychological and neurological structures necessary for linguistic competence are to be found” in the “mental life” of the speaker, and thus Chil is defined by a bodily absence, an individual deficit (2004: 153).
However, in actual talk, Chil shows himself to be a competent and adept conversationalist. Goodwin details how communicative features such as ‘nonsense’ syllable use, prosody, intonation and turn taking, and interactional, embodied resources like gaze and posture, are used by Chil to not just participate in ongoing conversational talk, but initiate and direct such talk himself.
The trouble with the deficit model of dis/ability then is it presents a version of capability that presumes a ‘normal’ human, and a deviation or absence of some ability, such as a limited lexicon, to be an indication of a “defective actor”. Yet this captures nothing of the mutual accomplishment of capability where such things as talk must be understood as an emerging phenomena, achieved in concert, with the involvement from others and a range of situational resources in-action. You might say, with the deficit model, capability is judged comparatively, always against some notional normative figure, always with an absence or lack of something that detracts from a ‘pure’ or ‘genuine’ presence in the world. No room is given for capability as it is achieved: how we—all of us—might just come to be capable in and through worlds strewn with ‘continuities and discontinuities’, and through ‘good and bad passages’ (Moser and Law 1999).
This takes me back to something a fieldwork informant, Jerry, told me. Comparing how people ‘take in information’ who have been blind from birth (as he has) with those who have recently lost their vision, Jerry thoughtfully comments:

We have a shared method I suppose of taking in information… It’s not… I don’t have to spend that time imagining the visual switch… They refer to the world that they live in as being like living in a fog, you know, nothing’s very clear. But I never had that feeling that my world is a fog. It’s the world.

I’m struck here by Jerry’s allusion to a world that is not forever placed in contrast to another. The ‘shared method’ is about coming to be capable, collectively, about living a life not dominated by a loss, a fog, but by being/becoming capable in/with the world. Another informant, Sarah, described something similar but in more concrete terms:

I was quite young when I learnt to take other cues. You know, people’s voice, what they sound like, how much they’re talking, are they suddenly really quiet [when] they’re normally really chatty, that they’re just not quite themselves. And quite often that’s an easy way. But! For example, the idea of catching someone’s eye across the room, that’s a foreign language to me. I just don’t even know what… I can in theory know what that means but in practice even if your head is facing towards me I don’t know who you’re talking to necessarily.

For Sarah, a visual cue—catching someone’s eye—is foreign, is other worldly; this could be used to highlight an absence in Sarah, the fog she lives in, a deficit in ability. But to me it feels more genuine to say she has become capable in/with a world that is other-than-visual. Dis/ability and what renders one more or less capable is afforded through a continual attunement in a world with others.
Jerry’s and Sarah’s reflections—that say so much to me about worlds that are other-than-sighted—bring to mind two related threads of work. One is a moving series of works from the artist Sophie Calle. In photos, videos and stories, Calle has people ponder on colour (“La Couleur Aveugle”) and beauty (“Les Aveugles”), and first and last sights (“Pour La Dernière et Pour La Première Fois”). Not all of those people Calle collaborates with are blind—some are seeing things for the first time (“Voir la mer”)—but in each case the audience is invited to rethink the relations between person, experience and sight, and imagine worlds that are more-than-sighted and actively brought into being.
A second related thread that reminds us of our active presence in the world is one which resonates with “the arts of feminist speculative fabulation” (Haraway 2016) and provides significantly different versions of capability to work with. In particular, it brings to mind Donna Haraway’s refigurings of human-machine entanglements and multi-species companionship, and also Vinciane Despret’s lively stories with animals. Haraway equips us with generative ways of imagining worlds actively brought into being, of composites of actors (of all kinds) defined not by “bounded utilitarian individualism” (Haraway 2016), but by becoming-with each other.

“Becoming-with, not becoming, is the name of the game; becoming-with is how partners are, in Vinciane Despret’s terms, rendered capable. Ontologically heterogeneous partners become who and what they are in relational material-semiotic worlding. Natures, cultures, subjects, and objects do not preexist their intertwined worldings.”

Like Haraway, I find this ‘becoming-with’ takes on tremendous value through Despret’s work. Despret’s sensitivity to ‘asking the right questions’ of conditions and actors of all kinds, and of their assemblages, open up the possibilities to so much more, to render us capable in so many more ways (Despret 2016). Just as Chil emerges as a competent speaker and his family “treats him as someone who has something to say,” (Goodwin et al. 2002) Despret is interested in the possibilities of “interagency” (Despret 2013), of what actors-together might be rendered capable of. Despret’s project—if it can be referred to like this—is thus an expansive one. It is to perpetually invite the prospect of new ‘devices’, new ‘practices’, new ‘conditions’, new ‘fabulations’, and to invite the chance, the risk, even, of becoming more capable together.
It’s just such a version of capability that I believe gives us so much more to work with. Dis/ability is not constrained by the imagined limits of what it is to be human, but rather made possible by the conditions actors (of all sorts) are active in.
So, what if we—those of us who think and live with dis/ability—found ourselves able to work with capability along these lines? How might we approach dis/ability, and imagine new figurings of technology and dis/ability? This is not the place to speculate on these imaginaries, but it does I hope show that a different onus is put on emerging technologies like AI. The versions of technosocial fabulations we might begin to tell here are not of the repair or replacement of vision (or other deficits in ability) but of enlarging what and how we become-capable-with, become more capable.

Despret, Vinciane. 2016. What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions? London: University of Minnesota Press.
Despret, Vinciane. 2013. From secret agents to interagency. History and Theory, 52(4), 29–44.
Goodwin, Charles. 2004. A Competent Speaker Who Can’t Speak: The Social Life of Aphasia. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 14(2): 151–170.
Goodwin, Charles, Goodwin, Marjorie H., & Olsher, David. (2002). Producing Sense with Nonsense Syllables: Turn and Sequence in Conversations with a Man with Severe Aphasia. In Cecilia E. Ford, Barbara A. Fox, & Sandra A. Thompson (Eds.), The Language of Turn and Sequence. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Haraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. London: Duke University Press.
Moser, Ingunn. 2005. On becoming disabled and articulating alternatives. Cultural Studies 19(6): 667–700.
Moser, Ingunn and Law, John. 1999. Good passages, bad passages. The Sociological Review, 47(S1), 196–219.

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Cynthia Bennett and Alex Taylor

In this paper, we begin with Ingunn Moser’s and Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s generative notions of care and use them to expand how we understand capability. Drawing on fieldwork with blind and vision impaired people, we turn our attention to a materially enacted, unfolding ‘sense-ability’. This is a sensing that puts (cap)ability and care together, that understands ‘seeing-in-the-world’ as a practical affair that is, at once, knowing, effecting and affecting with others (humans or otherwise). Thus, we show not only that care can contest an ‘instrumentalism’ in forms of knowing and doing—by ‘re-affecting objectified worlds’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011: 98)—but also give a greater clarity to how care can be, in practice, entangled in practice. This sense-ability seeks to be active, enlivening how we become capable; it is figured to be worked with, not finite and dictated by assumed bodily limits, but open to becoming-with and becoming-more. Borrowing from Vinciane Despret, this sense-ability is “to gain a body that does more things, that feels other events, and that is more and more able…” (2004: 120).

Despret, V. (2004). The Body We Care For: Figures of Anthropo-zoo-genesis. Body & Society, 10(2–3), 111–134.
Moser, I. (2011). Dementia and the Limits to Life. ST&HV, 36(5), 704–722.
Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2011). Matters of Care in Technoscience. Social Studies of Science, 41(1), 85–106.

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As Sarah’s introduction to the paper outlined, our co-writings were an attempt to think with the emerging strategies of feminist counting, accounting and re-counting.
Below, I present my part to the co-authered piece. It’s long, so I put it here more for the record than any expectation it will be read. I must add that the ideas I present draw on work done by . Without her energy and always thoughtful investment in the field site, this reflection would not have been possible:

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Session 1

The Slow Times of the Digital, Paul Dourish
Digital Accessibility: Ageing and the Mattering Counts of Arts Engagement, Amanda Windle
Counting the Future; the designed artefacts of prediction, David Benque
Making inventions count: the gender politics of design patents, Kat Jungnickel
Phoebe Senger — Discussant

Session 2

Writerly (ac)counts of finite flourishings and possibly better ways of being together, Sarah Kember and Alex Taylor
Capital numbers and the obscure numericality of code, Adrian MacKenzie
Reimagining Work: Heart Labor, Heart Time, Lucian Leahu
Secretaries, Counting Time and AI, Jessa Lingel and Kate Crawford
Repair as Transition: Temporalities of Breakdown, Maintenance and Recuperation, Steve Jackson
 
See the backchannels post here or just see the preview text for our track below:

B

eneath us there is a ticking, the ticking of a computational count that winds its way down to the next interrupt. This counting joins up a web of surprisingly static things—an internet of sensors and input devices. But, below, the operations are lively; data of all sorts and at every perceivable scale are combined and mined to report, forecast, and act on a dizzying array of possibilities. Pacemakers, cochlear implants, smart watches, activity monitors, smart homes, transport systems, power grids, traffic lights, communication systems, logistics, cashless payments, emergency services, surveillance systems, space stations—everywhere, an unending amalgam of algorithmic systems that keep our bodies and spaces ticking.
Yet, as the sequential and relentless count keeps ticking, how and where exactly do the agencies that pulse through these computational systems entangle with our own? Where do substance and system conjoin, or ‘intra-act’ (Barad 2007), to enact the bodies, spaces and worlds we share in common? What capacities are afforded and ‘authorised’ (Despret 2004) through such worldly becomings—with their obdurate logics of efficiency and rationales organised by numbers? And how do they give shape, perhaps, to a different kind of critter, new varieties of “trans-corporeality” (Alaimo 2012), generatively figuring different worlds of numbers (Verran 2001)? Who and what else might come to count in this proliferation of counting?
Following their own hunches and leads, humanities and social science scholars have been grappling with such questions by working through their own examples of this “regime of computation” (Hayles 2005). Katherine Hayles started early with her writings of a ‘universe’ where “computation… is taken as the ground of being.” (1999: 34). Since then, many of us have sought to account for beings of this sort through all manner of substances (Fujimura 2011; Kruse 2013; Taylor et al. 2014); bodies (Crawford Lingel and Karppi 2015); practices (MacKenzie 2003; Beer 2015); places (Kaika and Swyngedouw 2000; Kenney 2015; Kitchin Lauriault and McArdle 2015); (infra)structures (Jackson and Barbrow 2013; MacKenzie 2015); and politics (Miller 2005; Nelson 2013; McQuillan 2015). Although disparate, what this mixture of work might be seen to point to is an uneasy uniformity of time-telling, a structured time that is enacted via the computational count and that configures a peculiar set of relations between life and labour. The count collapses life as labour-time, constituting it in terms of quantified metrics, performance and productivity.
Critically examining these relations between time, the count, and forms of life/labour, our research might also be seen to point to more careful and caring imaginaries of who and what could count in/through computation. With what we would want to call a “feminist time-telling”—that is to say, one that thrives not in the singularity but promiscuity of time-telling—we find the possibility for alternate encounters with the ubiquitous count. The alluringly singular, teleological organization of time is disrupted through anomalies raised by such things as redemption, regression, repetition, and rupture (Felski 2002: 21). Surfaced are the multiple bodily, political and ethical entanglements and becomings, the temporally bound ‘processes of mediation’ (Kember and Zylinska 2012), in computational regimes. The count, then, is ‘geared towards measurably enhanced productivity, performance, transparency and efficiency’, coincidently ‘core values of neoliberalism’ (Kember and Zylinska 2012). Likewise, we find it intensifies and extends the reach of gendered biopower by enforcing an alarmingly regressive portrayal of women’s labour in/of time. Yet through the hopeful but modest stories we tell about the lively complications, we show a care for difference and how it might be given space amidst the counting.
“The problem is” as Grosz relays in her conceptual refiguring of feminism, materiality and freedom, “… how to enable more action, more making and doing, more difference.” (2010: 154). Our two session track is designed to provide a forum where topically diverse works like those above might mingle, and possibly intermingle, to enliven new interconnections and mutations that make a difference. As well as offering a moment in which we might interrupt or make a cut along the lines of counts and computation, we invite possibilities for frictions, laughter, experimentation, (dis)agreements, and generative refigurings of where we might go with all these counts—where we might reimagine who/what really could count amidst this counting. A counting by other means.
References
Alaimo, S. (2012). States of Suspension: Trans-corporeality at Sea. Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 19(3), 476–493.
Beer, D. (2015). Productive measures: Culture and measurement in the context of everyday neoliberalism. Big Data & Society, 2(1).
Crawford, K., Lingel, J., & Karppi, T. (2015). Our metrics, ourselves: A hundred years of self-tracking from the weight scale to the wrist wearable device. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 18(4–5), 479–496.
Despret, V. (2004). The Body We Care for: Figures of Anthropo-zoo-genesis. Body & Society, 10(2–3), 111–134.
Felski, R. (2002). Telling Time in Feminist Theory. Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 21–28.
Grosz, E. (2010). Feminism, materialism, and freedom. In, D. Coole & S. Frost (Eds.), New materialisms: Ontology, agency, and politics, 139–157.
Kaika, M., & Swyngedouw, E. (2000). Fetishizing the modern city: the phantasmagoria of urban technological networks. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research.
Kember, S., & Zylinska, J. (2012). Life after new media: Mediation as a vital process. MIT Press.
Kruse, C. (2013). The Bayesian approach to forensic evidence: Evaluating, communicating, and distributing responsibility. Social Studies of Science, 43(5), 657–680.
Fujimura, J. H. (2011). Technobiological imaginaries: How do systems biologists know nature? In M. J. Goldman, P. Nadasdy, & M. D. Turner (Eds.), Knowing Nature: Conversations at the Intersection of Political Ecology and Science Studies (pp. 65–80). London: The University of Chicago Press.
Hayles, N. K. (2005). My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts. London: University of Chicago Press.
Jackson, S. J., & Barbrow, S. (2013). Infrastructure and vocation: field, calling and computation in ecology (p. 2873). Presented at the CHI ’13: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, New York, New York, USA: ACM Press.
Kitchin, R., Lauriault, T. P., & McArdle, G. (2015). Knowing and governing cities through urban indicators, city benchmarking and real-time dashboards. Regional Studies, 2(1), 6–28.
McQuillan, D. (2015). Algorithmic states of exception. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 18(4–5), 564–576.
MacKenzie, D. (2003). An Equation and its Worlds Bricolage, Exemplars, Disunity and Performativity in Financial Economics. Social Studies of Science, 33(6), 831–868.
Mackenzie, A. (2015). The production of prediction: What does machine learning want? European Journal of Cultural Studies, 18(4–5), 429–445.
Miller, C. A. (2005). New Civic Epistemologies of Quantification: Making Sense of Indicators of Local and Global Sustainability. Science, Technology & Human Values, 30(3), 403–432.
Nelson, D. (2013). Yes to Life= No to Mining’: Counting as Biotechnology in Life (Ltd) Guatemala. The Scholar & Feminist Online, 11(3). Retrieved October 15, 2015, from http://sfonline.barnard.edu/life-un-ltd-feminism-bioscience-race/yes-to-life-no-to-mining-counting-as-biotechnology-in-life-ltd-guatemala/
Kenney, M. (2015). Counting, accounting, and accountability: Helen Verran’s relational empiricism. Social Studies of Science, 45(5), 749–771.
Taylor, A. S., Fisher, J., Cook, B., Ishtiaq, S., & Piterman, N. (2014) Modelling Biology – working through (in-)stabilities and frictions, Computational Culture 1(3).
Verran, H. (2001). Science and an African Logic. London: University of Chicago Press.

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This is a brief comment on a meeting Barry Brown and I hosted at Microsoft Research Cambridge, titled .

“Interaction as a a promiscuous concept”: it’s Stuart Reeves’ phrasing that nicely captures the sentiment of our small meeting’s discussions. The collection of short talks and the emphasis given to talking (and not just lecturing), gave rise to a language of critical but positive reflection. Rather than deliberating on an ‘after’ or ‘post’ interaction turn or wave in HCI, interaction was seen to still offer a great deal. The consensus (led by positions from David Kirk, Abi Durrant , Bill Gaver and Stuart) was it provides us with a device or machinery in common, and, conceptually, there remains much to do with the word that keeps us open to new domains and indeed new (design) possibilities. Here, I’m reminded of Isabelle Stengers use of the phrase a “tool for thinking”. It certainly appears interaction (still) provides us with just such a tool.
And yet I felt there was a shared frustration — or at least a frustration in myself — of what limits come with using the word interaction. With it, I find it hard not to feel bound to mediation as a central matter of concern, and alongside that being drawn to a fixed ‘divide’ between humans and machines that must be bridged or somehow solved. For me, this brings to mind Karen Barad’s ’ in which she introduces “intra-action” to purposefully contrast it with the “the usual ‘interaction’, which assumes that there are separate individual agencies that precede their interaction”.

With interaction, it seems we also struggle to account for the worlds that are instantly and irrevocably entangled in our ‘interactions’ with machines, the scales of order (Eric Laurier) or scaling (Alex Wilkie) that always looms large. Among her reflections on the day, Kat Jungnickel reminded us of Leigh Star’s wonderful “Cultures of Computing” in which she writes evocatively:

“, typing this, my neck aches and I am curled in an uncomfortable position. I try to think about my fingertips and the chips inside this Macintosh as a seamless “web of computing,’ to use Kling and Scacchi’s classic phrase (1982). But chips make me think of the eyesight of women in Singapore and Korea, going blind during the process of crafting the fiddly little wires; of ‘clean rooms’ I have visited in Silicon Valley and the Netherlands, where people dressed like astronauts etch bits of silicon and fabricate complex Sandwiches of information and logic. I think of the silence of my European ancestors who wore Chinese embroidery, marveling at its intricate complexity, the near impossible stitches woven over a lifetime with the eyesight of another generation of Asian women. I think, I want my body to include these experiences. If we are to have ubiquitous, wireless computing in the future, perhaps it is time to have a less boring idea of the body right now—a body politic, not just the substrate for meetings or toys.”

So, yes, interaction analysis, such as that from Christian Licoppe, offers us some compelling tools for examining the unfolding detail of mundane activities, but how do we extend these analyses to account for a wider ethics (Yvonne Rogers), the “body right now”, and indeed our own productive roles in enacting these cuts (Kat)? How might we focus our attentions not on the agencies intrinsic in humans and things (before interaction, if there could be such a thing), but where and how agency is brought into being (Alex Wilkie and Mike Michael).
I ask, then, is this the point of inflection? As we turn our minds and bodies to very present technocultures that surround us, ones where things take on new agencies (David Martin), have the capacity to push back (Elisa Giaccardi ), and where data infrastructures and algorithms are pervasive (Airi Lampinen and Barry), these weaknesses become increasingly prescient. How are we to think with the “usual” interaction here? How does a preoccupation with a human-centred interaction with machines give us the capacity to see things and practices that stitch and weave across geographies and over lifetimes? Do our promiscuous interactions, if you will, leave us room for thinking and making around these sprawling, always provisional cosmopolitical land- and time-scapes?
Here, might we sketch out a way to move on in which the uses and design of technology become ways to extend our thinking about and with promiscuous interactions? These interactions—from small scale, one-to-one tinkerings, makings, and repairs, to movements and transformations at scale—aren’t so much things that follow knowing (or for that matter produce what we know); the divide here isn’t between knowing and interacting. Rather they are active processes through which we come to be in the world, not just in what we know, but how we organise ourselves, what we value and care for, etc. We might grapple with things, materially, at the one-to-one scale, but we are forever working with their extending web of entanglements (Abi Durrant). This, we might say, is to take interaction seriously, to understand it beyond the object of study and see it more as a productive reconfiguration of what for many of us have become the troubling disciplinary divisions between the social sciences, design and computing. What we have is an inventive orientation to interaction; whether it’s the detailed study of car drivers using Facebook (Christian Licoppe) or the economic and political assemblages emerging through widely distributed Uber and AirBnB use (Barry and Airi Lampinen), interaction gives us a way to cast things differently and get closer, so to speak, to the entanglements.

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The seminar is summarised as follows:

Considering Peter Sloterdijk’s rendering of a Heideggerian ‘being-in’ this informal seminar will be a situated reading. The discussion will be located at the Royal Society of the Arts to spatially think through an approach to Peter Sloterdijk’s ‘spherology’ across disciplines. How, where and with what matterings do we embark our daily readings is no trivial matter? Sloterdijk’s writing can both inform and trouble readers and so the adjacent readings from and will open up further questions and provocations. Sloterdijk’s recent publications have been aimed at a design audience (namely architects) and with his media theory the following digital media question will be proposed.  With a broadly experiential and performative approach in mind the discussion will loosely consider spherology in this respect:

• This formulation opens to the somewhat irreverent question (following Sloterdijk’s own irreverence) of how his thinking can be turned into an app or an application (app displacing application displacing theorisation displacing philosophisation, the last term barely being a word)?
• How might Sloterdijk’s work be reparatively questioned through a feminist enquiry? How might Sloterdijk’s metaphors engage us intra-actively?

I’ve sketched out my response to the latter:

First, I have to say I am not really familiar with Sloterdijk’s work, and I come to the suggested text informed by two equally lively but quite different threads of thinking. One is ‘relational materialism’ as articulated by Annemarie Mol and a host of others in STS (sometimes in differing flavours). The other is a feminist technoscience that draws heavily on Barad and Stengers, as well as Donna Haraway, Lucy Suchman, etc.
Turning, then, to Sloterdijk (and his short Spheres Theory piece), I like the question of islands, and the mixtures of thinking introduced by comparing and contrasting islands to spaces as varied as apartments and worlds. This mixing of the mundane with the, well, global seems to me to raise lots of interesting questions about our modes of being, about ontology. I also quite like the idea of foam as a analytical device as it conjures up much of the multiplicity, and contingent and provisional qualities of being that I take from scholars, again, like Haraway, Suchman, etc. So these concepts of islands and foam, etc. are as Sengers would call them helpful ‘tools for thinking’ (p. 186).
Yet, at the same time, I must admit that I feel uneasy about what I see to be the strong humanist position that runs through Sloterdik’s theorising. For example, I’m uneasy with the Freudian and evolutionary (p. 3, middle col) types, symbols, stages, etc. that are so full of categorical fixity and “grounding definitions” (Stengers p. 187). This, for me, is summed up in Sloterdik’s evocative question about the “the difference between the paw and the hand” p3. Why should we be looking to difference here, at least in any essential way? My worry is that Sloterdik’s position occupies, too much, the ‘major key’ or ‘centre stage’ (p. 186) to borrow from Stengers or what Barad calls ‘atomistic metaphysics’ (p. 813). That is, in instructing us to see humans, islands, houses and indeed architecture in quite definite ways, Sloterdik provides us with a ‘stake defined by an either/or disjunction’ (Stengers p. 186), you are either in or out.
So, like I said, I see the ideas of foam and the like as useful ‘tools for thinking’, but I am not so sure about the outside-inside binary Sloterdijk mobilises here. For me, coming out of (post)structuralist sociology, I immediately think of Durkheim, Mary Douglas and also the anthropology of ritual (Van Gennep 1960) when I think of inside/outside and the production of the home as scared vs profane. And then there is of course Foucault (with his understanding of the ‘order of things’ (2005)), who Barad reminds us leaves us with much trouble to ‘hold on to’ (p. 813) or ‘stay with’ (Haraway) when it comes to our personal bodies and the wider politics that surround and invade us, inside (Foucault 2010). From these loosely connected threads of thought, I like to think of the inside being made or ‘performed’ (Barad) through the ordinariness of (domestic) material labour. Isn’t it the routine but at the same time ritualising practices that make homes to be the special/sacred inside places that they are? Home as, forever, an ongoing endeavour, never to be defined by “inherently determinate boundaries or properties” (Barad p. 813)?
This is no doubt an ungenerous characterisation, but I take Sloterdijk to be working with an almost essentialist idea of inside, something tied to our evolutionary biology, and to some extent our (metaphysical) mastery over nature: “Biology deals with the environment, philosophy with the world” (p. 3). Although he is ready to present his theory as a “spatial interpretation” and not one able to “explain everything” (p. 3) he seems prepared to proclaim what things like philosophy, biology and homes are, not how they are, and how they are always already ‘becomings’: so, for instance, “homes are initially machines to kill time.” (p. 5). While I like the provocativeness of statements like this, I find them too general and too couched in a restricted, elementalism  — as if we might just break things down in these neat ways.

“Approaching a practice then means approaching it as it diverges, that is, feeling its borders, experimenting with the questions which practitioners may accept as relevant, even if they are not their own questions, rather than posing insulting questions that would lead them to mobilise and transform the border into a defence against their outside.” (Stengers p. 184)

I would like to ask what it might be like to be on the inside, living right there and making do with the things and practices (a lá Stengers) that are available to us (and that we make available). To me this ‘thinking par le milieu’ (Stengers p. 187,from Deleuze) is a more responsible and responsive understanding of our presence and role in place. Yes, I see that Sloterdijk, with his foam and islands is doing some generative work to blur the boundaries and reveal the fluid relationality inherent between things, practices and space. Nevertheless, he looses or seems to overlook the performative qualities of ‘being there’ (that is much more than Heideger’s rather too general Dasein), and entangled in the “(re)configurings of the world” (Barad p. 816),  of being there ‘accountable’, ‘responsible/responsive’ and ‘belonging’ (Barad/Stengers).

Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28(3), 801–831.
Foucault, M., Ewald, F., & Fontana, A. (2010). The birth of biopolitics: lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979. M. Senellart (Ed.). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Foucault, M. (1970). The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Tavistock Publication.
Stengers, I. (2013). Introductory notes on an ecology of practices. Cultural Studies Review, 11(1), 183–196.
Sloterdijk, P. (2009). Spheres theory: Talking to myself about the poetics of space. Harvard Design Magazine, 30, 126–137.
van Gennep, A. (1960)  The rites of passage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Kenney, M. (2015). Counting, accounting, and accountability: Helen Verran’s relational empiricism. Social Studies of Science, 1–23.

Kenney’s article is very much a homage to Helen Verran and her wonderful book Science and an African Logic. She pays special attention to Verran’s efforts at decomposition and frames these through a lens of accountability. Care is given by Kenny to differentiate this kind of accounting from that of “contemporary neo-liberal bureaucracies” that run the risk of strengthening “the academic culture that privileges critique and revelation over other, more subtle and creative, approaches.” (p. 8)
What I particularly like about Kenney’s reading of Science and an African Logic is the emphasis she places on Verran’s ‘generative critique’ and, in these same terms, the way we might come to understand the empirical/ethnographic account.

“Verran […] helps us see ethnographic writing conventions as generative, not of true representations (tracings of real relations) but of promising fictions, echoing Strathern’s definition of ethnography as an ‘effort to create a world parallel to the perceived world’” (p. 10).

For me, this is such a helpful way to think about the accounts we produce as field researchers. It gets us past questions about factual or realist representation. It reminds me of something I heard the singer PJ Harvey say on Radio 4 a while back. Talking about Harold Pinter’s poetry and ‘the poetry’ of Kubrick’s films, she evocatively describes what she sees in them:

As with Pinter and Kubrick, then, I appreciate Kenney reminding us that ethnographic accounts such as Verran’s must be written/read as “an alternative way of figuring and paying attention to differences that may enable different forms of response and participation.” (p. 11)

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